You Are My Only

by Beth Kephart

  “But the broom’s up here,” she says tightly. “In the closet.”

  “I guess I forgot,” I say, certain that she can hear my tumbling heart from where she’s standing, can see the thickness of things beneath my sweatshirt, can guess at how frightened I am that she will try to move past me—turn the corner, look down, see what I’ve done.

  “what has gotten into you, Sophie Marks?” she demands. She holds herself steady with both of her hands, one fist each around the railing above the planks. The spiderweb trembles with every word she speaks. She glances up, then glances back down, looks into me.

  “I wanted to clean,” I tell her, and it’s like the truth, all of a sudden, as if she has no right to doubt me, as if the only lies between us are her lies, stuffed into boxes.

  “You already cleaned.”

  “But not with the broom,” I say. “And I couldn’t find it.”

  “Now, isn’t that odd?” she says, and she stares at me for the longest time, black heat in her dark eyes and hurt in the way she stands, and suddenly I realize that she’s tipping back, that she’s losing balance, that she might stand on these steps and fall.

  “Mother!” I call, and by the time I run the planks, she has tumbled to the landing—fallen back instead of forward, a shuddering sound that breaks the web from the rafters and sends it drifting into my arms, reaching for her.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” she says, pushing me away and steadying herself, looking hurt and small and full of indecision, as if she can’t decide what to believe and she cannot keep her balance, and I feel sorry, all of a sudden—sorry for her knees, sorry for her hiding, sorry that she does not choose to trust me. That my past is not my past, but hers. That every single day she’s been lying.

  “Mother.”

  “The groceries,” she says, pulling herself up now, so slowly by the thin rails of the basement, with the white fists of her hands. “would you mind putting them away? I’ve left them on the counter.” Her words are stiff and far away. She looks unwell and dizzy.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “We don’t need that kind of cleaning.”

  “Okay.”

  “When you’re finished, you come and find me.”

  Emmy

  When I wake, Autumn’s gone. I don’t need to open my eyes to know it. It’s how the air feels less alive. It’s how I am the only one who’s breathing. It’s what I don’t smell, and what I do smell, which is fear.

  “Autumn?” I say. “Autumn?” I yank the thin sheets off, pull my sweater from the drawers, see how the globe and the goggles have gone missing, how Autumn’s bed is rumpled, empty. Autumn! I reach for the lamp and pull the chain, and in the hard light I see the note she’s left me, written across the chest of drawers with a crayon stolen from Crafts. Emmy, I will find him. He will help us.

  I turn, and there’s the train on the sill. I tear through the sheets, through the drawers, but the envelope’s gone, Arlen’s address and handwriting, and Autumn is gone, and it is not yet dawn. “Autumn!” I cry, and I am across the room and through the door and running, my good leg, my bad leg, my feet bare, the sound of my weight on the tiles. It’s dark and empty in the long hall, and only Julius is here, running his mop across the floor. “You see her?” I ask him, and he shakes his head no, and still I’m running, calling her name, banging my hand against the red down of the elevator button—one two three four five one two three—until it pings and the doors glide open, glide closed. Four. Three. Two. One. When the door pings open again, I run down the long hall past the pale windows, past the courtyard, which is piled high with snow. “Autumn!” I call, and the guard at the front desk is sound asleep over his Daily News, his feet up on the desk, his head thrown back, as though somebody went and put pills in his cup. Somebody could have. I have him under my spell. Autumn? I remember the globe of pills. I think of her note upstairs. I think of Autumn wanting to be free every single day. And with every second that passes, the sun is rising, and through the door now, the heavy panels of glass, I see footprints, fresh, in the snow, across the spoking paths. I see the scarf, a slash of red, against the white.

  “Autumn!” I cry, and the guard doesn’t stir. I reach the door. I yank it hard. And I am running.

  Sophie

  “She found you?” Joey’s saying. “when you were down there?”

  “Never been so scared.”

  “And then she fell? Backward?”

  “Like she was fainting, but she wasn’t. She was all down on the floor and then all come-to, telling me to put the groceries away, and then to go find her, and when I found her, she was on the La-Z-Boy, and she wouldn’t look up; she wanted nothing. She’d been to the library, and the old books were gone—all the math and science. She was fast asleep. She’s sleeping now.”

  “You sure?”

  I nod, trace my fingers down the long scratch of Joey’s arm, a twig scratch, wrist to elbow. He has leaves in his hair, like he is wearing a costume, instead of the cap he mostly keeps on his head, and he called me Rapunzel when he climbed inside, and then he leaned down and he kissed me, the salt and sweet of peanuts, long and out of breath from all the climbing, the reaching for me and me for him, and then he remembered that he’d brought me a brownie, which was Ziplocked in his pocket and shaped like squish from the climb. “They’re sending their love,” he said, and then he said that he couldn’t stay long, and besides, he was afraid of my mother waking up and climbing the stairs, and everything he said, he said in a whisper, which is harder than talking and more tiring, too.

  “Couldn’t ever make it up those attic stairs,” I promise. I whisper, too. I know the risks we are taking.

  “But what if she hears us?”

  “I’ll say it’s mice that I was chasing.”

  “You have it all planned out?”

  “Contingencies,” I tell him, sounding braver than I feel. “The old what-ifs.”

  “I guess.”

  He stands there, balanced on his attic plank, tall, with pitcher’s arms and curly, leaf-stuck hair. I stand here, two feet on my plank, in worn-down jeans, my sweatshirt strings too tight at my neck. when Joey leans, I lean and his lips are mine, his breath is my breath is his breath. “Share it?” I ask, pulling back, meaning the brownie, but he says he’s had plenty already, and dinner is soon, besides, and when I pull the squish from the Ziploc and break a piece and put it on my tongue, it’s a beautiful melting moistness like none I’ve ever had.

  “I found something,” I say when my tasting and swallowing is done.

  “What did you find?”

  “The Book of Thoughts. In the personals. In the basement.” I rustle my hand up into the folds of my sweatshirt and pull the book into the light that comes in through the window. It’s a thin paper thing, hardly any writing to it. I flip through it, then snap it shut, and close my eyes, and keep breathing.

  “It’s five sentences,” I say. “or six.”

  “That all? That’s all her thoughts?”

  “I’m not really sure,” I say. “exactly. Some of her thoughts. I guess. At least.”

  “Looks old,” Joey says, looking from me to the book, which I’ve placed on the sill. “And rained on.”

  “Box has got a date on it,” I say. “November 1995.”

  “At least that old, then.”

  “At the very least.”

  “What else was in there?”

  “Photographs. Baby toys. Little plastic hangers. Juggling puzzle pieces.”

  “That all?”

  “Didn’t have time but to grab one thing.”

  “The Book of Thoughts,” he says.

  “Would you read it?”

  “Me?”

  “The way you read to Miss Helen?”

  “Right here? Like this?”

  I reach to pull a leaf from his hair. I reach again to kiss him. “I’d feel better,” I say, “hearing it from you.”

  “All right,” he says, leaning closer.

  I trade my p
lank for his and crush beside him.

  “‘The Book of Thoughts,’ ” he reads. “Page one. ‘we love in our own ways.’ ”

  “That’s all of page one?”

  “That’s all she put there.”

  He reads the way he reads.

  I close my eyes to listen.

  The Book of Thoughts

  We love in our own ways.

  The sky was blue, and it was easy.

  I wanted to die. They wouldn’t let me. I wanted home. There was no home. And after that, when it was done, after it all, then I had nothing. We love, and it’s gone up in smoke.

  There was no one who could understand. I went from town to town, then stopped. I worked the Clock and Watch. I took my hour off ahead of noon and walked the back streets, empty, and the sun was a flame, and it was the fault of the streets being empty. It was the fault of whoever had left you. It was the fault of them not knowing that children left untended die. I worked the Clock and Watch. I was walking the neighborhood streets, which were sun-blazed and empty. Your hands in the grass were pale and pudgy. You had been left to the weather.

  I wore white, a mother’s color. The sky was blue, and it was easy.

  We love in our own ways.

  Emmy

  I ran where she had run. I fit my footprints into hers—down the stairs, across the courtyard path, between the benches piled with snow and the half-wall of azaleas, like animals with crystal fur, past the red jag of the scarf in the snow. The end of the night was the beginning of day. The sky was fuzzy. Now the footpath was Carter Road, and the road turned, and to one side was the brick face of a long, low building, the black spirals of escape stairs, the smoking chimneys, and to the other was the wild slope of iced grass and white stones. Beyond the field was the dark hem of far trees, and hanging from the limbs of the trees were bottles and cans catching glints from the sun that was still rising.

  “Autumn!” I kept calling. “Autumn!” Her name freezing in the air before me, then snapping back. My bad leg was a thin pole. My feet were blue in the snow. “Autumn!” Her note in my pocket, her words in my head, her practicing—our practicing—to be free. And now the narrow road turned, and the plowed snow was banked to either side, and the highway was up ahead. In the dawn before me was the globe. Africa, North America, Asia, the constellation of spilled pills—how many, I wondered, had she slipped into the guard’s cup, and how, how had she done it?—and still the footsteps were running between the treads of tires in the snow. I could hear a bus chuffing up ahead, the honk and blare of cars in a hurry to get anywhere but State. I could smell the burn of tires against the slick of snow, the fumes burning through, and I knew before I got there, before I saw the long, angry knot of traffic, the rounding red and blue of the police cars, the hard heart of the ambulance, with its doors slamming closed. “Autumn!” I was screaming. “Autumn!” And she was locked inside, and the siren lit up, and she was gone. There was a man and a woman, a car pulled to one side, its headlight shattered. There were the goggles, where she’d dropped them, to the ground.

  Emmy, I will find him. He will help us.

  “No! No! No!” I screamed. But the ambulance drove off, and Autumn was gone.

  Sophie

  “There’s something else,” Joey says, and he’s holding me now, both his arms around me, his back against the wall, my back into him, and in his hands a page of yellowed newsprint that had fallen from The Book of Thoughts to the fluffed-pink floor.

  “I don’t understand,” I say over the hard knuckle of my throat, and he hugs me for a long time and says nothing, and now he turns the newsprint in the square of window sun and reads: “ ‘Infant Stolen in Broad Daylight.’ ” There’s a picture of a baby. There’s the baby’s mother, her eyes round and big like the baby’s. “Manhunt Continues,” the smaller headline reads. “Mrs. Rane could not be reached for comment.”

  Emmy

  She stands too straight in the spine, as though she is stacked inside with secrets. She folds and crouches close.

  “There is news,” Bettina says.

  I turn in my bed and say nothing. I stare at her through the glass of my eyes. She has come every night, so many nights, since Autumn died, her goggles the only important something she left behind. She has come again tonight, claiming news. She reaches for my hand. I let her take it. She wears her cross again, touches it with her free fingers, stares into the night, into the wild and ruined world.

  The night is shiver cold. The air is crystals. Bettina pulls the blanket to my chin.

  Autumn never told me her secret, I want to say. I must confess. I cannot bear it. Because it was my secret that stole her, that took her from me; her cot is empty.

  “We have had our conference, Emmy,” Bettina says now, after so much silence has passed between us. “We are agreed.”

  “You are agreed,” I repeat, the words dull in my mouth.

  “Dr. Brightman will meet with you tomorrow. He’ll explain.” She exhales, and the air goes white.

  “Explain what?” I ask.

  “Impeccable behavior. Consistent self-care. Responsible. Trustworthy. No episodes. I wrote a report. Miss Banks wrote a report. Even Granger wrote a report. Dr. Brightman has been watching, and he listened.”

  I shake my head, don’t understand.

  “Your freedom, Emmy.”

  “My freedom?”

  “There’ll be rehabilitation, of course,” she says. “Steps to take. A process. But you’ll be free. They will release you. You will have your old life back.”

  “I will never have my old life back.”

  “You have earned your wings.”

  “Listen to me,” I say. “Listen. I have got no place to go. What good is releasing?”

  “You will make your own home, Emmy. You’ll be taught how. You’ll get a job. Vocational will help you.”

  “But,” I say.

  “This is an opportunity,” she says.

  And she holds my hand, holds it like Mama would have.

  “My heart is broke,” I say.

  Sophie

  The knock comes in the middle of the night and keeps on coming—a smash against the door, a pounding like an animal running. “Cheryl Marks,” the voice calls. “open up.” And I can hear Mother in her room, creaking off her bed, creaking on the floorboards, her bad leg dragging. “Jesus,” I hear her saying. “oh, sweet Jesus.” And now she’s calling to me in an edge of broken whisper, “You keep to yourself, Sophie. You let me handle this.” And still she’s walking in circles, dragging her leg, and the smashing comes faster, harder, and they’ll break the door to nothing; they will bang through it, blow the house down, and Mother’s on the stairs calling, “I’m coming,” in her best official voice. “I’m coming.” She walks the loud middle of the steps, turns the corner on the landing, and when she descends again, takes the last flight of stairs down, I crawl from my bed and head to my door and go as far as I can without her seeing, my head hanging over the rail now as she drags across the living-room floor. The banging stops, and the mix-up of voices, and now there’s the flame of flashlights against the back wall, a spiking flicker that slowly settles until the downstairs is aglow, and my mother’s shadow and their shadows bulge and shrivel on the illuminating wall, and Miss Cloris is among them. It’s her square shadow. It’s her puffs of hair, her shape behind the others. There are three of the others, and there is my mother, and there is Miss Cloris, and my mother is screaming, “Don’t touch me!” and the voices, the men, are saying, “Calm yourself, Mrs. Marks. we have some questions.”

  “You have some questions?” she shouts back. “Barging in here in the middle of the night?”

  “It has come to our attention.”

  “What has?”

  “We are speaking of a serious crime.”

  “Sleeping in one’s own house is a crime?”

  “If you’d just come with us, down to the station.”

  “I have work. The first shift. In the morning.”

 
“Mrs. Marks.”

  And now there’s the shuffling of paper, and one of the men walking toward her, and now she’s growling, “where did you get that? wherever did you.…?” Her voice like a knife scraping a plate, and I think of Joey, scrambling down the tree, The Book of Thoughts tucked into his shirt, the stolen infant, the promises he was making—“They’ll know what to do; they always do.” And I think of my mother, at dinner tonight, the long sorrow in her eyes and the thieving in her and her not knowing that I was knowing, that Joey’d read her words: The sky was blue, and it was easy. We love in our own ways. “what’s the matter with you?” my mother demanded, impatient. “You aren’t eating, and it’s store-bought, too.” And I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t swallow, and I held my hand against my chest, so that all the broken pieces of my heart wouldn’t bleed the space between us. The No Good is you, I wanted to say. You running from you, you taking me with you. And it was right here all along, and if white is a mother’s color, what is my mother wearing? where is she—my real, true mother? Be good.

  “Calm yourself, Mrs. Marks,” they’re saying. “we’d like to take you downtown, ask you some questions.” But she’s growling at them now. She’s kicking and I see it all in the spike lights on the wall, see the biggest man of the three taking her elbow into his hand, and the other coming up to her other side, and Mother insisting, “You ask me right here,” and someone saying, “You have the right …” And all this time, Miss Cloris is a tilted shadow on the wall, and finally it’s Miss Cloris who says, “Let’s not forget what is most important here.” My mother is being wrestled down. There’s the sound of chains and key, and she’s growling, my mother, demanding to know who Miss Cloris is and what she’s speaking of and is she the owner of the infernal dog and if there’s any trouble on this street, it starts with that wolf barker, and over this and through it, Miss Cloris is saying, “Let’s not forget why we are here. The child’s name is Sophie.”